When you first visit DPLA's portal, you are given a variety of ways to find cultural materials.
For example, you can perform simple searches, sort the results, and filter them by format, contributing institution or partner, date, language, location, or subject.
In addition to a familiar search paradigm, we provide a few additional interfaces that allow users to find and interact with collections in new ways.
For example, we provide a timeline, which presents groupings of items or search results grouped by the date of creation or publication in an easy to browse format. This can make it easier for some users to browse large result sets.
The DPLA Bookshelf provides is yet another way that we provide an innovative mechanism for users to interact with materials available through our portal.
The items on Bookshelf represent digitized books available through the portal, from providers such as the University of California, the University of Illinois, and the New York Public Library.
The shelf is shown as a vertical stack so that the titles and authors are more easily readable on their spines.
The width of the book represents the actual height of the physical book, and its thickness represents its page count.
The spine is colored with one of ten depths of blue to indicate how relevant the work is to the reader’s search.
When a reader clicks on one of the books, additional information about it is displayed to its right. The reader can open the book with the click of a button.
Further, when a reader clicks on a book, the DPLA Bookshelf displays thumbnails of images within the DPLA collection related to that book’s subject areas.
Clicking on a thumbnail displays the image and additional information about it.
In addition, can explore further by clicking on one of the subjects under which the book has been categorized.
This replaces the existing shelf with a shelf containing all the other books in the DPLA collection categorized under that same subject.
We also provide a map-based interface that allows users to identify the places associated with a given item. I'll be talking about the map, how we augment the data we receive to produce this map, and some of the issues we've identified in the process, later in the presentation.
In addition to these interfaces I've just discussed, DPLA also provides curated exhibitions that provide topical or historical context to some of the items to which we enable access.